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Self-styled Utah prophet gets additional 15-year prison term

Associated Press
Published 4:24 p.m. MT June 28, 2018

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Samuel Shaffer, leader of the Iron County-based religious sect Knights of the Crystal Blade, pleaded guilty to rape of a child and child abuse Wednesday, Feb. 21, 2018, in 5th District Court in Cedar City. He is scheduled to be sentenced April 10, 2018.(Photo11: James M. Dobson / The Spectrum & Daily News)Buy Photo

SALT LAKE CITY — A self-styled prophet who led a doomsday cult and secretly married young girls because of his beliefs in polygamy and has already been sentenced to 26 years in prison has been given a 15-year term following another guilty plea.

Samuel Shaffer, 35, was sentenced Wednesday in Manti after pleading guilty to one felony count of child sodomy, the Deseret News reported. Other charges including bigamy, lewdness involving a child and an additional sodomy count were dropped in exchange for the guilty plea.

Samuel Shaffer, leader of the Iron County-based religious sect Knights of the Crystal Blade, pleaded guilty to rape of a child and child abuse Wednesday, Feb. 21, 2018, in 5th District Court in Cedar City. He is scheduled to be sentenced April 10, 2018. James M. Dobson / The Spectrum & Daily News

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Prosecutors say Shaffer led a group called the Knights of the Crystal Blade based on arcane Mormon ideas long abandoned by the mainstream church. He and his fellow self-styled prophet, John Coltharp, 34, proclaimed to each secretly marry two young girls aged 4 through 8 related to the other man.

Shaffer was charged in December 2017 after police with helicopters and dogs raided a remote makeshift desert compound made out of shipping containers about 275 miles south of Salt Lake City. Authorities found the girls hiding in flimsy plastic barrels and a nearby abandoned trailer where Shaffer said he had placed them to protect them from the winter weather.

The men had taken the children to the compound months before in preparation for an apocalypse or in hopes of gaining followers, authorities said.

Shaffer speaks at hearing

At the hearing Wednesday, Shaffer told Judge Marvin Bagley that he had hoped to have a family and grow old with one of the girls.

"I sincerely believed that child marriage was a correct principle from God. And I've seen the consequences of what's happened, and I know that I shouldn't have done it now," Shaffer said. "But I sincerely believed that the practice was correct at the time."

"I'm not aware of any religion in this world that justifies an adult having a sexual relationship with an 8-year-old girl," the judge said. "Certainly it's a violation of Utah law."

A third man, Robert Shane Roe, 34, of Castro, California, was charged this month with sodomy of a child in connection with the group. He allegedly met the cult's founders in a Facebook discussion group last year and traveled to Utah to join them.